Brawn opens ahead of launch on Columbia Road

Brawn, the new restaurant from the team behind the award-winning Terroirs, has opened unoficially this week in London's Columbia Road ahead of its formal launch.

Brawn, the new restaurant from the team behind the award-winning Terroirs, has opened unoficially this week in London's Columbia Road ahead of its formal launch.

Anyone eating or drinking during the restaurant's dry run is promised a different experience from its Trafalgar Square partner restaurant, said Doug Wregg, head of wine at Les Caves de Pyrene, which is behind both ventures.

"Brawn is proving it isn't simply a chip off the Terroirs butcher's block but is forging its personality (a Brawn identity?)," he said.

Brawn is described by Wregg as "a small cosy cafe-restaurant with two rooms comprising wooden floors, mismatched tables and chairs, whitewashed brick walls (soon to be adorned with the smiling fizzogs of wine growers)".

The menu is divided into sections such as Taste Ticklers, Pig, Plancha, Raw, Slow Cook and Pudding & Cheese. Pig is very much order of the day here, with the restaurant's name coming from the brawn style of cooking pork.

Signature dishes include Garfagnana Brawn, Jesus du Pays Basque and Caillette, a kind of sausage boule of chopped meat and offal wrapped in a pig's caul. The menu also features some of the meaty home-made terrine dishes familiar to Terroirs regulars.

Provenance is key at Brawn, said Wregg, and all growers and producers are named on the menu from Luigi Caccamo in Calabria for his Nduja di Spillinga to the Bellandi family for its Garfagnana.

The wine list is less extensive than Terroirs, said Wregg,with around 120 bins. He promised a "moveable drinks feast" with wines of the week and blackboards denoting special parcels and old vintages. "There is a bit of anarchy in the way it is arranged with quirky categories such as Stones, Shells and Sea; Clean Lines; Oxidative and or Yellow; Vins de Soif; 'sunbaked, cicada-loud, ageless country of scrub and terraced hills' (Medium reds); Pinot Noir - naturally and Residual Sugar," he explained.